Whether you are a Taylor Swift fan or not, you must have seen the memes highlighting Swift’s excessive use of her private jets. Swift flew her jet 98 times in 2024 with a total flight time of about 225 hours. Celebrities like Swift have been using a little-known trick by the FAA to conceal the records of their private jets from the public.
But this program is not just for celebrities and billionaires. ICE is using this loophole to carry out President Donald Trump’s inhumane mass deportation flights. To obscure the planes carrying the immigrants out of the country, ICE is taking advantage of a longstanding program created by the private jet lobby. For years, the scheme has allowed celebrities and Wall Street CEOs to block their flight data from public view partially, and now it is being used by ICE.
The FAA regulations have been a boon for ICE and its contracted private charter airlines after the mounting public backlash. CNN first reported on the trend, noting that ICE’s charter airlines were requesting some of the planes in their fleets be scrubbed from public flight tracking sites.
However, deportation flights can still be tracked in real time using other public data. But ICE’s use of the FAA’s private jet blacklist underscores how a growing push for privacy by the corporate jet lobby is being deployed to limit public oversight of ICE’s draconian immigration crackdown.
Read More: Immigrant Women Face Threats from Fake ICE Agents Amid Rising Extremism
Heritage Foundation, Taylor Swift, and ICE
In the 1990s, the FAA first started sharing the real-time air traffic data with airlines to improve operations across the industry. Other commercial vendors were eventually allowed access to this data. In 2005, the website FlightAware was launched, which published real-time flight data for both commercial and private flights.
The move was perfect. It created transparency while improving operations for the aviation industry. But transparency is always a thorn in the side of billionaires. This new transparency drew opposition from the $250 billion private aviation industry. The lobby groups argued that publishing the flight data of billionaires’ and celebrities’ jets posed “security” risks. However, they failed to provide any evidence to support their claim.
In 2000, Congress, paid off by the National Business Aviation Association, a corporate jet lobbying group, would allow private jet owners to block their aircraft’s identification information from FAA data released to private vendors.
For more than a decade, the program worked flawlessly for the private jet industry. But in 2011, Obama passed a regulation stating that the FAA no longer planned to honor the block requests unless private jet owners submitted evidence of a legitimate “security concern”. As expected, the lobby failed to provide any evidence, which essentially gutted the program.
The private jet lobby was in a panic. The National Business Aviation Association quickly sued and bought hundreds of groups to line up in opposition. The Heritage Foundation announced that the new rules would “destroy” the privacy of billionaires and celebrities. Under pressure and bribes flowing in from the lobby group, the FAA backtracked just months after the 2011 announcement, allowing the program to continue. But now it would be managed directly by federal regulators, not by trade groups.
There are tens of thousands of private planes currently on the “hide list”, according to a tracker maintained by Jack Sweeney. Sweeney is the online researcher who has become famous for tracking private jets owned by Taylor Swift and Elon Musk, among others. In December 2023, Swift’s lawyers sent Sweeney a cease-and-desist letter. Musk, for a time, banned Sweeney from Twitter over “ElonJet,” the account that tracked Musk’s jet location. But Sweeney has refused to take down the trackers.
Read Next: ICE is Hunting Delivery Drivers as Trump Transforms Washington into a Military Zone
Why ICE Still Can’t Hide
Just like ElonJet, ICE’s deportation flights will remain available even if they are protected by the FAA, thanks to the enthusiasts who feed this information, called ADS-B data, into open-source exchanges. The workaround has infuriated Musk and the private jet lobby, who have advocated against flight-data crowdsourcing.
Sweeney was surprised by the recent additions of private charter airline planes used in deportation flights to the LADD list. Earlier this month, he highlighted two aircraft owned by Avelo Airlines that had been quietly added to the program. According to Sweeny, adding a commercial airline to the blacklist was unusual.
According to The Lever, two Avelo Airlines planes and seven GlobalX planes are currently on the LADD list. The data comes from the charter airlines’ fleets maintained by Airfleets and Sweeney’s public LADD list reproduction.
At the “request” of the private jet lobby, the FAA has recently moved to roll back other transparency requirements for private jets. Last year, in the months after Musk launched a crusade against Sweeney over ElonJet, lawmakers inserted a provision into must-pass aviation policy legislation that established a new program to allow private jet owners to obscure their planes’ ownership information, information that was once publicly available. The FAA began to roll out that program in March.
The move followed expansions of the LADD list, as well as the launch of a new program to make it more difficult for planes to be tracked using the ADS-B database.
Read Next: Republicans Are Becoming the “Thought Police” In Their Support of Israel